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Monday, July 04, 2005

"Armando" Muses on "Marriage"

A consistently, one might say relentlessly, annoying and presently high-profile dKos diarist call-signed “Armando” has managed to transform the Daily Kos from a site I would eagerly turn to several times a day for American lefty news and commentary into one that I now read only when I have found nothing to compel my attention elsewhere from more witty, insightful, and politically reliable sources like Eschaton, Hullabaloo, Liberal Oasis, and James Wolcott.

Armando’s smug centrist missteps and misfires usually inspire an eye-roll, dismissive tongue-cluck, and a quick mouse-click toward sense somewhere else in the cyberspatial sprawl, but today his post on gay marriage provokes an actual comment. This is not because it is more egregious than other discursive dishes he has recently served up (I think his morally tone-deaf encomium to the disastrous Kelo v. City of New London decision was probably even more aggravating to me), but because his post is so typical of an oafish mindset that often effloresces among especially the straight white “some of my best friends are gay –- but shut the fuck up with your whining about being treated as a citizen we’re trying to win elections here” guys of a certain age who apparently throng the broader dKos community (and, one assumes, the Democratic Party) whenever queer issues come up.

Armando begins innocuously (and ungrammatically): “From California, the question presents itself -- does equal rights for gays require gay marriage?”

Then comes this encouraging bit of news, ripped straight as it were from today's headlines:
California's attorney general on Friday urged the state Supreme Court to decide whether gay marriage is permitted under the state constitution. Attorney General Bill Lockyer asked the justices to review a trial judge's decision in March that said state laws limiting marriage to heterosexual couples is unconstitutional; the ruling had been stayed pending appeal.

... The move came two days after gays and lesbians won a major legal victory before the state Supreme Court, which let stand a new law granting registered domestic partners many of the same rights and protections of heterosexual marriage.

“Do gay rights require the word ‘marriage’?” asks Armando, deflating the stakes from the outset by pretending this is a matter of mere wordplay. “Of course,” he quickly adds, waving his hand to ward off any suggestion that he might not quite grasp the reality of the oppression of his queer brothers and sisters, why, some of his best friends may well be gay, “the reason for denying gays the use of the word marriage to describe their relationships is homophobia, in my opinion.”

Now, stop. Pause here. Re-read that caveat.

If it is true that the denial of marriage to committed queer relationships that would avail themselves of marriage if they could is homophobia, and homophobia is wrong, and wrongs should be righted, then what does one expect to follow from such an analysis?

Why, an abstract apolitical discourse on marriage, of course! No cocks penetrating asses on marriage beds here, thank heavens! No dykes on bikes or silly hairdressers mincing about demanding that they be treated as human beings and losing “us” votes. Nothing to offend the white muscular war-mongering consumerist Christ of middle-America.

Armando dons his professorial spectacles and settles into a club chair, the cushion of which exhales a long languourous fart. “[S]hould ‘marriage’ be a matter for the State? For the Church?”

You may notice that Armando has now put “marriage” in quotation marks. This is possibly because he is no longer talking about the kind of marriage that everybody knows is quite conspicuously a matter for the State and the Church[es] in the actual world we actually live in, but some different phenomenon, also called “marriage,” one which presumably sets in motion instead the sophistical energies that once impelled medieval scholars to contend over the number of angels that can dance on pin-heads.

“Should all relationships, heterosexual and gay, be ‘civil unions’ for the purposes of the law and government?” I don’t know, Armando, should they? It’s an awfully interesting question. Oh, I’m sorry, I fell asleep there for a second. Here are some questions for you. Pop quiz, hot shot:

Do you see any likelihood that marriage will be disarticulated from the State any time soon? Are you going to devote your considerable energies to that project? Or is this an issue about which you don’t care at all, really, except in rare moments when some queer people actually seem to take a little real-world baby-step in the direction of greater citizenship and thereby attract some scary public attention in the process?

Do you really think that the fundamentalist Christians and others who supposedly swoon at the thought of queer people being treated as human beings and participating in human social institutions like marriage will be more likely to join you in a grand project to re-invent marriage altogether? Do you expect anyone who is now or desires to be married to cheerfully resign themselves to a transformation of the institution into a purely private matter or spiritual exercise unconnected to civil union contracts? Do you actually think that homophobic straights would be more pleased to share the status of their more modest civil unions with queer people as equals than they are the more capacious status of marriage in the first place?

As it happens, I find marriage to be a profoundly suspect institution, originating in ugly possessive patriarchy and now suffused with damagingly unrealistic romantic pop-psychological propaganda. It remains to be seen whether marriage as an institution might grow into something more interesting and rewarding in the fullness of time. To be honest, I have my doubts, but my partner Eric and I wouldn’t mind an equal opportunity to participate in that experiment, however suspicious we may be about its problematic history and debased reality. However that may be, there is simply no question at all that the denial of this institution to the likes of us facilitates our ongoing exploitation and dehumanization and stigmatization in ways that render us vulnerable to violence and abuse and threatened in our status as equal citizens.

Whoever wants to challenge the legitimacy of bourgeois patriarchal marriage has my sympathy and my interested ear –- but the extension of marriage as it is actually constituted in the world to all the citizens who would make recourse to it is an altogether different order of question than that. Please don’t try to pretend the homophobic denial of marriage to queer people is an episode in some broader revolutionary project to transform, demolish, or secularize marriage as such. Don’t add insult to injury by telling me you’re not a homophobic asshole, really, but some kind of freedom fighter when you deny me my rights as a fellow-citizen, or yawn in the face of my ongoing institutional stigmatization.

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